Despite the tacky cover, with its closeup of perfect, cellulite-free legs and the suggestion of other enhanced body parts, this book is no “penny dreadful.” Instead, the cover accurately reflects the values of the beautiful people of Cascade Heights, a gated and walled residential community thirty miles outside Buenos Aires with full-service security–along with a golf course and top-quality tennis. The wealthy residents of The Cascade, as they call the community, have left their old lives behind, and many of them are delighted to have escaped some unpleasant memories. Living in elaborately built houses with spectacular landscaping, the three hundred residents have created a world apart, their children leaving for brief periods each day to attend an equally elite school outside the community, and then returning home, where they can wander the grounds at will, without supervision. The women have few, if any, interests outside the community. Argentine author Claudia Pineiro carefully analyzes the behavior of these residents, concentrating, in particular, on four couples who live in the same neighborhood. Suddenly one night, after playing cards, three of the four men are found dead in the pool. The investigation reveals the essence of the community.
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More like a fiendish sudoku puzzle than a traditional police procedural, this blockbuster novel, set in Oslo, challenges alcoholic Inspector Harry Hole to find solutions to four cold-blooded murders, which may or may not be related. A “square peg” in the police department, Hole does jot hesitate to do things his own way, often infuriating his peers while still inspiring (sometimes grudging) respect for his honesty. A bank robbery in which a gunman executes his female hostage because the bank manager exceeds twenty-five seconds to fill a bag with money is just the start of the non-stop action. As Harry Hole investigates the similarities between this robbery and the stunning earlier robberies by Raskol Baxhet, a gypsy now incarcerated, the reader is jerked every which-way, his/her perceptions constantly changed as new information emerges about the characters and the past. A terrific mystery.
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In this extraordinary debut novel, author Lucia Orth uses the five years she worked for a non-profit organization in Manila to provide information, background, sensitive description, and color, however dark, about life in Manila for all levels of society. With an eye for the “unbelievable” and an ear for the absurd, she recreates Manila society in the early 1980s, the last years of the reign of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos. Focusing on Trace Caldwell and his wife Rue, Americans working for US National Security interests in the Philippines during the Reagan years, the author takes a microscope, one with no “politically correct lens,” to examine US policy regarding this third world country. (On my Favorites List for 2010)
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Telling Avgoustis’s story obliquely from several points of view, including that of Litsa, the true love of his life, whom he has abandoned in Greece, author Ioanna Karystiani creates a tender portrait of a proud man in thrall to the “swell,” with little to draw him home. It is only when the reader discovers (early in the novel) that Mitsos is actually blind, something that he has been able to keep secret from everyone, including his crew, that some of his deliberate self-isolation begins to make sense. He knows every foot of his ship, the Athos III, eats every meal alone in his cabin, stares at maps “from memory,” grows a beard so he will not need to shave, and lets his hair grow to shoulder length. He runs the ship by feel, through the “swell,” even bringing the ship safely through bad storms and equipment failures. As long as he does not return to Greece or be available to meet company representatives, they cannot force him to give up his ship.
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Turkish author Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel soars to new heights, taking fiction itself to an exhilarating new level and blurring the lines between fiction and reality in new ways. Ostensibly the obsessive love story of Kemal Basmaci, age thirty, for a beautiful shop-girl named Fusun, eighteen, the novel explores much more than that, examining not only the physical passion which underlies their relationship and their lives, but also broader themes involving the connections between love and memory, between memory and reality, and between love and reality. Including metafictional elements in the telling of Kemal’s story, Pamuk himself participates in the story as both a fictional and a real character, adding another level to the story. In a unique tour de force, the author is now creating a (real) Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, located in the house in which Fusun and her fictional family “lived.” In essence, we have author Pamuk creating a fictional story about fictional people, whose real house and the objects in it (described fully in the fictional story) become a real physical memorial to the fictional characters in the love story which Kemal has “asked” Pamuk to write for him.
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